Meg McManama

I often think of Rilke, who didn’t attend his daughter’s wedding
For fear it would distract from his poetry, or Rodin
Who (nearly) didn’t marry his wife of 53 years,
Who never claimed his son. And then there is Thoreau in Walden.
Even my friend, a wife, an only daughter, a professor, chose not
To have children and instead writes five masterpieces a year.
             But then there is Sharon Olds holding her life’s life in her arms,
             Or Silvia Plath and her little loaf,
             And Ben Johnson, who, when his seven-year-old son died,
             Wrote here lies my best piece of poetry.
             Johnson who tucked his sonnet in at night, nursed his volta’s
             Fevered forehead until it was finished and still. Little voices
I have heeded, little bodies I have grown: a parent’s art is all
Our own, but a loan, and never done